Skills you need

Terms you should understand

binding of a model to a rig/skeleton so that it moves according to the bones movement

Uvw mapping

unfolding of the mesh on a 2D plane so that you can paint it

Texturing

the painting of a model

Normal mapping

the creation of a secondary texture which determines light reflections and not modelled details like tiny groves, scars, etc.

Vanilla

original, unmodified game assets

How-To

Install all of these tools.

Build your armor however you prefer, there are dozens of methods and which you choose depends on the kind of armor and how you like to work. (see appendix A1 for some examples) just make sure that important joints like knees, fingers, elbows, feet, shoulders, etc are where they belong or you will have to deal with heavy transformations during animations that do not look real in-game.

Import the vanilla skeleton.

Skin the model to the skeleton. (see appendix A2 for examples)

Add a "BSDismemberment" Modifier (that one adds the ability to dismember certain parts of the armor and allows you to target those in VATS)

- Select a bunch of polygons, elements, etc and assign them to ids and their bodyparts

Export your model as *.nif with the following settings

Open two instances of nifskope,

- in one you open your newly exported myArmor.nif

- in the other open a vanilla armor with as many bones as necessary

- in both instances click on view --> block list --> show block list in tree

- in the vanilla armor delete every ninode or nishape that looks like a piece of the vanilla armor so that all that is left is the skeleton and the meatcap objects

d - Assemble something from parts you cut out of other armors (preferably not using meshes from other games, movies, mods, etc as that would be illegal)

The easiest way is probably a, the fastest imo b, c is only really useful if your armor looks very different in shape from the vanilla body, d creates very good looking results due to the quality of the vanilla meshes in comparison to most modders skills but is rather limited.

A2

a - use the "skin" modifier and weight each part of your model by hand

b - use the "skin wrap" modifier and copy the skinning of another armor that looks similar to yours onto your model (very fast, efficient and yields good results)

c - combine both methods, use skin wrap for soft elements like cloth and skin rigid elements like steel plates by hand

A3

names that are used by bones => heavy deformations or crash

sceneroot => crash

arms => visible in 1st person view

upperbody => not visible in 1st person view

You can also uses names like upperbody:1, upperbody:2, etc and the effects of naming it upperbody still apply.